The call came when I was cooking dinner, which surprised me. Bad news usually comes in the middle of the night. My good friend Drorit’s daughter, Tal—one of my youngest son’s best friends—had been in a car accident. By early morning, she was dead.

The next day, an hour before Tal’s funeral, I rode my bicycle to the cemetery of our village on the Mediterranean shore in the Western Galilee. Everything was gloomy and gray: the sky, the sea, and the dismal task that lay before me. I’m a member of our village’s chevra kadisha, the burial society (the literal translation is “sacred society”). We perform the tahara, the washing and dressing of a dead woman for burial. About two hundred families live here, so I usually know the deceased. Most of the time the women are elderly, and while I feel somber doing their tahara, I sense that the women are at peace, surrendering to their fate. But now I faced performing this rite on a 17-year-old girl.

The call came when I was cooking dinner, which surprised me. Bad news usually comes in the middle of the night. My good friend Drorit’s daughter, Tal—one of my youngest son’s best friends—had been in a car accident. By early morning, she was dead.

The next day, an hour before Tal’s funeral, I rode my bicycle to the cemetery of our village on the Mediterranean shore in the Western Galilee. Everything was gloomy and gray: the sky, the sea, and the dismal task that lay before me. I’m a member of our village’s chevra kadisha, the burial society (the literal translation is “sacred society”). We perform the tahara, the washing and dressing of a dead woman for burial. About two hundred families live here, so I usually know the deceased. Most of the time the women are elderly, and while I feel somber doing their tahara, I sense that the women are at peace, surrendering to their fate. But now I faced performing this rite on a 17-year-old girl.